The Copper Still Irish bar in New York City’s East Village offers 200 different whiskeys in a chic setting.
Photograph: The Copper Still

It’s before noon on Sunday and more than a half dozen men are seated at the downstairs bar inside Ryan’s Daughter. They aren’t there for brunch – the Irish bar doesn’t serve food. They are regulars who like to spend their Sunday mornings watching sport. Forget mimosas and eggs Benedict – all these men need is a beer.

At the end of the bar is Michael Mellamphy – “Mick” to his friends and customers – co-owner of the bar. Ryan’s Daughter is one of the hundreds of Irish bars and pubs in New York City. One count puts their number at 2,000, which means that there are 10 Irish bars for every Starbucks in the city. Think of them as coffee shops for blue collar workers in the five boroughs of New York. Amid the city’s soaring commercial rents, these regular working-class haunts, with their good beer, whiskey and comfort food, once seem invincible.

But that’s no longer enough. These bars now compete for customers and real estate with restaurants that employ mixologists instead of bartenders. Some have felt the pinch: according to Crain’s, among the many recent closures are establishments like the original Blarney Stone on Third Avenue, Kennedy’s on West 57th Street, Blarney Cove on East 14th Street, Dewey’s Flatiron on Fifth Avenue, Druids on 10th Avenue, and O’Flaherty’s on Restaurant Row. There’s also The Emerald Inn on Columbus Avenue and O’Neill’s on Third Ave.

But as some traditional Irish bars are closing their doors, new ones are taking their place. To avoid a similar fate, these new establishments are putting a spin on the old formula, adding in craft beers and fancy food.

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Mellamphy is hoping to avoid doing that at Ryan’s Daughter, which he says is still very much a Yorkville pub. On the edge of the Upper East Side neighborhood, it’s still “very blue collar”, he says.

“Everyone’s got a million different craft beers that you can taste elderberries off and charge $16 for a six ounce goblet for,” Mellamphy says. “That’s great. There is a place for it. But for me, the big thing is the neighborhood feel, having a place where people feel welcome, feel at home.”

Ryan’s Daughter took over from another pub in 1979. Mellamphy, who was born in Dublin and grew up in Cork, started working there as a bartender in May of 2000. In March 2011, he and another bartender took ownership. The former owner still owns the building above.

Working at a pub, Mellamphy says, is like an apprenticeship.

“You end up working with these guys that are older,” he says. “They have been around the block.”

The same thing happened to Shane Buggy, who still bartends at McSorley’s, the oldest Irish pub in New York City, four nights a week. In his spare time, Buggy can be found in the East Village at his own bar: The Copper Still.

The three partners in front of The Copper Still: co-owner Brendan Clinkscales, right, Edward Buggy, and co-owners Shane Buggy and Michael Brannigan, who also tends the bar at McSorley’s. Photograph: The Copper Still

“I came to America just for the experience, and I ended up falling in love with New York,” he says. “I landed on a Wednesday. I started at McSorley’s on a Friday.”

Historically, many young Irish immigrants had only two options – working at a construction site or behind a bar. At 21, Buggy had already spent over four years bartending back home in Ireland, but bartending in New York terrified him.

“I was dreading learning about the high-end cocktails – this, that and the other – and the computer system. Then I walk into McSorley’s, which is a cash bar with two beers,” he laughs.

A lot has changed over the past seven years, and Buggy learning more about cocktails and computer systems has been the least of it. The industry as a whole has undergone a transformation. For one, the demand for craft beers has grown exponentially in the past three to four years. Some expect the number of craft breweries to increase by thousands more in the next few years.

The true moment of validation for craft breweries might have come at the end of 2013, when even Guinness had to admit that it struggled to hold its own in the US market.

“We wanted to go a step above a bar menu,” Buggy says of the food menu at The Copper Still. Photograph: The Copper Still

In the nine months since The Copper Still has opened, the thing that’s changed is the variety of whiskey on offer, Buggy says. The previous bar offered 60 different types of whiskey. When it opened, The Copper Still offered 80. Three weeks later, it upped that to 100.

“Now we are up to 200 whiskeys, because the demand is there. People want this? Let’s give them what they want,” says Buggy, pointing out the additional shelving built to fit the selection. “We brought in the unique whiskey, a lot of rare whiskeys, and then the household names that people want. We were surprised with that demand. We thought 80 was going to be more than enough. We never expected anything like this.”

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Meanwhile, Colin Stewart, former bartender and manager at Dempsey’s in New York’s East Village, watched gentrification sweep through the neighborhood – once “punkier and edgier”, as he describes it – from his spot behind the bar. As consumer spending started to recover after the 2008 recession, customers became less interested in low prices and more interested in the value of what they were spending their money on, he says. Forget the $3 beers and budget shots.

Dempsey’s is half a dozen blocks south of The Copper Still. Nestled between them is Stewart’s bar: Cooper’s Craft and Kitchen. It’s not actually an Irish pub – more like a gastropub that sells a variety of craft beers. Thomas O’Byrne, one of Cooper’s three co-owners,owns Dempsey’s and Sláinte, both traditional Irish pubs. The third co-owner, David Clarke, also started out as a bartender at Dempsey’s, like Stewart.

If you sit down at Cooper’s and ask for a Guinness, the bartender will tell you that you are out of luck.

“Not at Cooper’s,” he says, quickly recommending a stout on tap.

By keeping a close eye on trends in the industry, Cooper’s, which opened in October 2011, hasn’t just been able to survive, but also to grow. In December, the owners opened another location in Chelsea. They hope to attract Google and other tech companies that have made that neighborhood their home.

“Working, living in the [East Village] neighborhood and working in the beer industry, we knew there was a market for craft beers,” says Stewart. “Gastropubs were sought-after too. People wanted their food upgraded. Prices were the last thing they were looking at. We saw the rise of the foodie.”

It’s those foodies and their whims that could pay the bills and keep a local watering hole in business. But as bars begin to cater to high-end desires, they could also risk alienating the regulars who just want to enjoy a beer after a long day at work.

Arguably, the best example of an Irish-British pub that embraced the rise of the foodie is The Dead Rabbit, which opened in the Financial District in 2013. Above a typical taproom downstairs is the parlor, where waitresses in red dresses and bartenders in suspenders serve fancy cocktails. Groups can order soup tureens full of these tasty concoctions, which are then ladled out of bowls into delicate china teacups.

Named one of the top Irish pubs in the US, The Dead Rabbit is often a destination for special occasions rather than a local watering hole, making it the exact opposite of the Irish bars that hope to maintain a blue-collar flavor.

Like The Copper Still, for instance. “It really feels like a local bar right now,” Buggy says. “Our midweek is the best part of our week. When Snowmageddon – or whatever the hell it was called – was coming in, I had to come in and ended up working, because we had all the regulars in the neighborhood coming in and enjoying a couple of cocktails.”

When they were debating opening their bars, the owners of Cooper’s, Ryan’s Daughter and The Copper Still all said that they wanted to helm venues where they would be comfortable hanging out – someplace they could feel at home.

“My favorite show growing up was Cheers,” says Mellamphy of Ryan’s Daughter, where an unspoken rule says all tabs are started under the customer’s first name. “And it is kind of like Cheers. It’s like a big family.”